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long fermentation

I've been learning and lurking on the site for about a year now and have learned so much from all of you! Thank you!

Here are pictures of the latest bread I've made, a long fermentation wholewheat-rye sourdough.

Here is the crumb shot:

I'm really happy with this recipe which is as follows:

100 G whole wheat flour

100 G rye flour

200 G bread flour

100 G all purpose flour

105 G starter (100% hydration)

20 G salt

300 G water

I mixed and, rather than autolyse at this point, I tried some stretch & folds, but found it way too sticky....so I wet my hands several times and it was easier to do the S&F (but it was more like kneading than the usual S&F with a higher hydration dough). I continued the S&F for about 30+ minutes, covered it with tin foil and left it on the counter (72 degrees F) for 7.5 hours and went to sleep. The next morning I then shaped the dough and let it rise for 45 minutes. I baked it at 450 degrees F for 20 minutes with steam throughout the entire 20 minute period (cast iron pan with a towel and water). The crumb is very moist, as if it had been a higher hydration dough, and rather sweet-nutty tasting. I really like the flavor of this one! Any suggestions for improving this?

I have done much research on TFL and all over the web (two weeks)and I am not seeing the solution to my quest. I have the Hamelman bread book on reserve at the library and I hope it will teach me a lot about how to design a proper recipe, as I see it is often referred to on TFL & elsewhere by skilled bakers.

Sorry for the delay. I thought I would have a chance to post day two right away. I am now in day three of the creation of the starter. So let's catch up!

Day 2

This is how my starter looked at 30 hours from the initial mix of 300g flour 300g water. I stirred it 5 times over the 30 hours. In the first 12 hours i had left the bowl, covered, on my pellet stove. It got up to 90 F, this was initially thought of as a mistake by me. So I moved the bowl to somewhere at room temp. Then over the next 28 hours it was alive with activity so awesome. So hopefully over the 30 hours you've seen activity similar to what is shown above. If it takes more time than 30 its ok, this is what you want it to look similar too before going on to the next step.

Feeding

You should have 600g of starter mix. Take 300g of this mix, add 150g of flour, and 150g water. I had just poured a glass of a nice weizen-bock and mixed the water with the yeast sediment in the bottle. I figured the more the merrier, yeast wise. Then mixed it up until well combined (No chunks of dry flour). To look like this.

Day 3

Here is how it looked at around 12pm today before I mixed it up again (not adding anything). Updates to come

So here we are...baking again. Thank God. Seriously. Grocery store bread really does suck. Eating that crap through my entire pregnancy almost killed me. Since the bouncing baby boy is now sleeping a lot better than before, baking once again commences.

This was a riff on Eric's Fave Rye. I forgot the sugar and caraway so it isn't really right. I plan on making it again.

This was my final formula for my everyday, I-need-something-tasty-that-I-can-be-lazy-with bread. The write-up on my new and improved blog is on my new and improved blog.

Next up I'm hoping to tackle San Joaquin Sourdough and some bagels. All this week.

Sometimes I see recipes using room temp fermentation for 12-24 hours and other times I see cold fermentation for 12-72 hours. Is there a benefit to using a specific one or is it a matter of preference? I mainly bake with freshly ground whole grains and am wondering if one way will work better than another, and do they achieve the same results or different?

I was concerned that my success with the whole grain hearth bread that I posted about early last month was just a one-hit wonder. Thankfully, it seems I can repeat it. Here's a few loaves that have come out of the oven in the past weeks:

I've also used the same technique for a 60-40 whole wheat to whole rye batard, and it, too, turned out well, though the crumb was, naturally, much tighter than in the loaves pictured here. I'd have taken pictures, but the camera was full and, by the time I got around to downloading them off of the camera's video card, the loaf was just a little nubbin.

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